Musings & occasional thoughts from the desk of Philip Lancaster

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The Tyranny of Time

This last few days, our one year old daughter has been waking early. It might be easy to curse and rue the lost hour in bed that we have been achieving quite reliably over the winter, but I have started to think that it is merely the season catching up with her. Time will, in a couple of weeks, catch up with both of them, as the clocks ‘Spring forward’ an hour to ‘darken our mornings’ and deny all that precious hour of sleep as we enter British Summer Time.

Whilst many will while away a happy few hours in a couple of weeks berating the loss of the hour, there is only one thing to blame: our tyrannical observance of time; our modern culture’s endeavours to adhere to, and account for, the minutest of horological increments, without any concession to the fundamental cycles that govern our planet, and the lives of every other creature that lives upon it. Our little girl is quite right: the sun is rising earlier, and so would we, if we weren’t regimented and controlled by our 9-5 work routines, post sunset television addictions or other such observances. We defy the world around us. We work the same length of day in winter as we do in summer; we seek to keep the same hours come what may. Why shouldn’t jobs and other such commitments begin at the second or third hour after sunrise, and finish at a similar fixed period before sunset? In summer we might counter the long days with a midday siesta period, as they do elsewhere in the world. Winter days would be less productive, but would it be that much so, and does it matter if they are? The summer would surely make up for it. In this misguidedly materialistic age in which money is the driver of everything, I doubt whether this seasonal flexibility would ever be conisdered seriously. However, there is one thing I don’t think can be denied: we in the western world need a serious dose of Rewilding.

The return of these thoughts (for they are thoughts I return to often) has brought back to me a poem I wrote a few years ago, which was published in my first short collection, Fulcrum. Indulge me if you will, or simply look away now, if you haven’t already.

Plain Sight

The deceit of Time creeps unceasing
in a myopia of tyrannical exaction,
contrivance of containment,
regulation of increments
in immeasurable microscopia
— an opiate of division, all-accounted;
tungsten dawns deluding,
denuding the seasons of defining
night; humdrum extraneity
of light, enlightenment, progress,
polluting, and masking far stars;
fixated and feinted by the day’s
diminutions in glazed isolation,
submerged in hermitic continuation;
TV-attuned, switched to remote
inoperation; inured of being,
cocooned in life’s birth-canal
to obscurity (or eternity?),
pushing, yet rising
rarely to ripple life’s surface
in a stasis of feigned living
in filmic fallacy.
— We are lost in the moments’ minutiae.

What do you see as you stand and gaze?
Our eyes and ears are gills
of chance and nurture
that filter the tide of vision
that bears upon us,
clouding clarity beyond our being.

Lift up your head!
Open the minding gills and drink
of sight, sound and thought!
Hark — the robin’s song from tree-height
shatters, cleaves the realms of time, earth,
sky, and the darkling roar of eternity’s
din breaks upon me, the world’s populace
— past, present, future — clamorous —
a billion lone voices in vast tremendous
tumult of sound, surging, searching,
piercing the air as a winded spear,
which crescents beneath the cover of cloud,
and cuts with its trail through the canopy’s
shroud, felling great trunks of shadow,
revealing a thousand stars and suns,
— then breaks and plunges
as darted gannets from sea-stacks
deep into earth’s swell
to gather the writhing threads of ages,
emerging to weave a weft of tales and time
through the warp of the present, revealing
the secrets of bird, beast and land until
now held fast in the scented breaths of earth. . .